Introduction to Target Audience Groups
Content is king, goes the famous saying. Content is how to communicate with your target audience groups, and your success depends on the quality of the content and its delivery platforms. There are many options before the marketer utilizes content to engage the audience and deliver results. It includes blogging, emailing, websites, social media, short messaging services (SMS), YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The job of the content marketer is to create appealing content, keep the reader engaged, and lead to sales conversions for the company.
Creating Engaging Content
Here are some of the target audience groups’ strategies to be adopted for creating engaging content:
The following are the target audience groups’ strategies:
1. Define your buyer persona
The first step in the content creation process is to identify the target audience groups by defining their age group, genders, interests, hobbies, industry, buying profiles, income, social status, and educational levels and create a fictional description. This will enable the content creators to create the most appropriate content. Without a target audience to define, content creation would be difficult. Sometimes, it could be a single buyer persona or several. The ideal way to create such a persona is by talking to your sales personnel, customer database, and surveys.
2. Content curation techniques
Content development is a laborious and sometimes expensive exercise, but not all content can be written by your company’s people. There are hundreds of sites and publications that may be developing content and publishing them. The process of identifying the appropriate content for our industry and sharing them or adding value to them is content curation.
Content curation can be done in three ways: by assessing the competitors, exploring the content landscape, and finding what interests the audience. One can survey the existing landscape using Google search and social media. At the same time, interests can be judged using the Google keyword planner tool to assess the popularity of keywords in your subject area. Online surveys may help determine whether they feel sufficient information is available on their problem areas or, if not, what specific questions need to be answered.
Once the topics for curation have been identified, it is better to think of value addition and make suitable changes wherever required. Adding your comments and sharing content through social media is a great way to stay connected with your target audience groups.
3. Topic selection, format, and headlines
The success of content marketing is very much dependent on the topic selection and giving proper headlines and subheads. It is better to work on broad topics and develop sub-themes on each of them. Within the topics, the writing strategy has to be evolved-whether it should be FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) or ‘How to’ articles, opinions, data analysis, news analysis, trends, introducing and explaining concepts, and so on. Headlines are the most visible face of an article or blog post. Therefore, proper attention is necessary to construct the headline; it should be appealing, attract readers’ attention, and entice them to open the article.
Question headlines are appealing as they tend to address a particular issue the readers may be facing; headlines should be longer, not short, should address the audience’s needs, appeal to their self-interest, or enable the reader to do something, For example, how to clean the spots on your clothes better? How to save on A/c electricity consumption costs?
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4. Call-to-Action
The content marketing exercise is not an academic effort or intended only for information purposes. It is vital to address an audience with the intention of making them your customers or clients. There must be definitive calls-for-action in the content- either as Register, Subscribe, Download, Accept, Decline, etc.
5. Keep content simple and straightforward
Content marketing intends not to show the author’s English language writing skills but to address the needs of select target audience groups in simple terms. As far as possible, avoid long prose and address the reader directly. For example, do you know selecting the right air conditioner can help you save 30 percent on annual electricity charges?
Did you know using a dishwasher can lower your water consumption by one-third, apart from the freedom you get from detergent allergies?
6. Content marketing should not appear as a hard sell
Content marketing is a multi-pronged strategy whereby companies need to use emails, newsletters, blogs, and websites to reach the target audience groups. However, it is different from conventional advertising, as the intention is not to send sales messages but to address a particular need of the target audience presentation, create awareness, show the solutions, and drive sales. In blogging, the writer must express his opinions which the reader may or may not like. But by not expressing them, they may not know or hate you but not like you either.
Emails should not become ‘sales emails’. they may unsubscribe or not open them after seeing the subject line. Instead, focus on the informative element and give solutions to problems faced by the consumer.
7. Pay attention to the design of emails, web pages, and blogs
These days content becomes popular when it is designed and presented in an appealing manner. Avoid clutter in web pages and email templates. They should be easily navigable with appropriate hyperlinks and call-to-action. Keeping off pop-up ads, sidebars, or opt-in forms would be better. It pays to invest some time and money to create good-looking pages as they will increase readability and engagement. Good design also means having good photographs, infographics, and videos to supplement the text. Nobody wants to read lengthy prose on an electronic screen, and the visual impact created by the page will determine the success of your content marketing campaigns.
8. B2b, B2C businesses require different strategies
If you are in the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) industry, the content marketing strategy may differ from that of Business to Business (B2B). In B2C, business content could be restricted to emails, websites, and FaceBook. In B2B, where the buyers are more serious and analytical, the best strategy may be to share relevant white papers, the invitation to webinars, case studies, blogs, videos, and infographics. The content may be more technical and focused on how it helps businesses improve efficiency rather than the product’s branding.
9. Don’t ignore the power of social media
Content marketers can no longer ignore the power of social media, however good the quality of content may be. According to a survey among B2B marketers, most believe LinkedIn generates the most leads, while others felt it was Twitter. As in content creation, there should be a proper strategy for social media promotion too. Products or services that need visual appeal for promotion are more suitable for Facebook, while text-oriented promotions are better for Twitter. LinkedIn was good for B2B marketing and corporate image building. In social media, consistency, relevance, entertainment, and information are all key factors that determine the success of a campaign.
However, since it is easy to set up a web page, it should not end up as an exercise of blindly sharing, updating, and liking activities daily. Ensure that only two to three posts per day are most relevant to your target audience presentation and likely to be shared and discussed. Moreover, the descriptions should be short, crisp, and witty.
10. Ensure the quality of blog posts
Now analysts attach much importance to blogging as readers look forward to it for honest opinions, commentaries, analyses, and forecasts. Blogs are more personal and can be written in the first person, while an article in a newspaper or magazine follows an editorial format set by the publication. This gives blog writing gives more freedom and room for creativity. Blogs should be of high quality. There must be the consistency of views, valuable information and insights, citation of data, and useful case studies.
Good quality blog posts also benefit from appearing on top in search engine listings. Some analysts point out that important keywords should frequently appear in a blog, but with changing algorithms of search engines, it is no longer necessary. The quality of content and its relevance to the target audience becomes more paramount.
Research indicates that longer content (ideally above 2000 words) is more seen and indexed by search engines. Therefore, big is beautiful when it comes to content on the web.
Apart from asking guest bloggers to write for us, we can also guest blog on other sites looking for content related to our industry and gain more visibility to our target audience groups.
11. Hire the best content writers or outsource content
Content marketing is about creating quality content, which is impossible without good-quality writers and editors. If a start-up or SME is not strong enough to hire full-time content people, it is better to hire freelance writers and editors to work for you. It also pays to get the support of graphic designers and web designers to supplement your text efforts. Using guest bloggers who are experts in a particular area can also reap rich dividends.
12. Get Client feedback on the content
As in any business, getting good feedback from customers and clients is invaluable for success. It is better to engage with the clients regularly to get their feedback and make suitable changes in the content required. It makes sense to leverage the expertise of the client for industry insights. They may not be great content writers; hence somebody should contact them and note their feedback and suggestions. It can be through phone, one-to-one meetings, interviews, etc.
Conclusion
Content marketing has been successful in both B2B and B2C marketing but requires different strategies. Good content can nurture leads and sales conversion and help keep customers engaged throughout the product lifecycle.
Emails and SMS can be utilized to announce new product launches, discount offers, exchange offers, bonus points, and reward points, and be used for referral marketing whereby the company gives out some incentive for referring friends or acquaintances to subscribe or buy a product. This goes on to prove that content marketing can be of immense benefit to the company continuingly.
Unlike a sales pitch or a branding strategy, customers don’t feel compelled to buy but learn, analyze, and understand a product before purchasing. Hence, content is viewed positively by the audience compared to advertising and sales promotional activity.
The website remains the most visible public face of any organization. Hence, great care is necessary to create, manage and update content on the site. There should be sufficient share buttons on social media on all pages for visitors to share content and widen the reach of the marketing effort. Apart from the website, which should be mobile-friendly with vertical scrolling features, there should be mobile content as net access through mobile is increasing at a rapid pace in many countries.
According to Neil Patel, altruism should reflect in your content rather than a sales pitch. Reach out to a large audience with help on various issues, which will keep the target engaged in your blog or site and enable long-term relationships. Therefore, Patel’s QuickSprout blog features several guides to online marketing, SEO, content, blogging, etc. This builds credibility for the business promoter in the industry and tremendous brand value for the company. For bloggers and writers, sharing personal experiences and mistakes is useful, as it immediately builds rapport with the readers as they can learn from your mistakes.
The marketer must keep the important functions of content in mind- inform, educate, enlighten, help, entertain, and engage. It is no easy task to achieve this. As a result, growing importance is given to content marketing, social media management, search engine optimization, creating a content strategy, web design, blogging, and other ways to reach the target audience groups.
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This has been a guide to target audience groups. Here we have discussed content marketing, a multi-pronged strategy whereby companies must use emails, newsletters, blogs, and websites to reach the target audience groups. You may look at the following articles to learn more:
